Victorian Literature and Culture (2010), 38, 187–206. Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright
C 2010 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/10 $15.00

doi:10.1017/S1060150309990386

THE STRAIGHT LEFT: SPORT AND THE

NATION IN ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

By Douglas Kerr

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Arthur Conan Doyle, a prolific writer with a global
reputation and readership, was settled with his family at Hindhead in Surrey. In his Memories
and Adventures (M&A) he was to recall this period as an interlude of peace: “The country
was lovely. My life was filled with alternate work and sport. As with me so with the nation”
(151). This last sentence refers chiefly to the apparent placidity of the time, soon to be rudely
spoilt by the outbreak of the South African war, which was to prove a critical and formative
testing-ground for Great Britain and for Conan Doyle personally. But the sentence can also
refer to the plenitude of a life divided between work and sport, and I will argue that Conan
Doyle would be right to claim his experience here as representative of the national life. At the
end of the century which invented modern sport, Conan Doyle’s enthusiastic participation in
sports, his writing about the subject, and his understanding of sporting culture have a great
deal to tell us about Victorian Britain. As with him, so with the nation.
Conan Doyle is unusual among writers in the importance he accorded to sport in his life
and the pleasure he derived from it. He may have been a professional writer living entirely by
his pen, but he was pleased when, after they became the first men to travel on skis between
Davos and Arosa in Switzerland, his companion Tobias Branger entered Conan Doyle’s
profession in the Arosa hotel registry as “Sportesmann” (M&A 293). As I will show, it is
crucial to this question that Conan Doyle professed sport as an amateur. Further, I will argue
that his sportsmanship does not make him less important or less interesting than more indoor
authors, either as a literary writer or as that instantiation of the public intellectual which in
his time was called a man of letters. To raise the question of sport is to activate the most vital
issues of late Victorian and early twentieth-century culture, not only the stalwart trinity of
gender, race, and class, but also physical and moral health, empire and war, modernity and
tradition, freedom and community, pleasure and money.
Sport was particularly involved in the idea of the nation at a historical moment when
this idea in England was undergoing an important metamorphosis. Richard Holt puts it this
way:

The formation of a distinctive English national culture in the late Victorian and Edwardian era is
undeniable but still not widely understood. The new consciousness of English culture that arose at
this time ranged from an interest in the purity of the English language and its literature to music,

187
188 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

folklore, landscape, and the idea of games as an embodiment of English spirit . . . Sports were not
just the source of high-minded ideals, they were inseparably associated with the more down-to-earth,
assertive, and patriotic Englishness. (263)

There has been a good deal of work on this late nineteenth-century development. Philip
Dodd’s essay “Englishness and the National Culture” was one important instigation. José
Harris finds in the late Victorian period “a subterranean shift in the balance of social life
away from the locality to the metropolis and the nation” (19). Stefan Collini has shown
how “the ‘nationalization’ of English culture” was expressed in the creation or extension of
national cultural institutions, and notably in the arrangement and celebration of a particular
tradition of English literature as a curriculum subject and a national heritage (347). More
recently, Krishan Kumar writes in The Making of English National Identity of a “moment of
Englishness” at the end of the nineteenth century. The English had been senior partners in
social structures and political systems – Great Britain, the British Empire – that directed their
attention away from their own ethnic identities and somewhat inoculated them against the
nationalism that was transforming Europe. “Ruling the roost, they felt it impolitic to crow”
(187). Imperialism was felt to trump nationalism, Kumar argues. “In the Crystal Palace
that housed the Exhibition [of 1851], the British half was divided into raw materials and
industrial applications; the other half, devoted to the exhibits of other nations, followed no
such order, and exhibits were classified by nation. The British contribution, in other words,
was ‘universal’, that of other nations merely ‘national’” (193). But later in the century when
new commercial and imperial rivals threatened Britain’s supremacy, and other domestic
nationalisms (especially the Irish)1 grew more insistent, there appears an English cultural
nationalism, a preoccupation with the “English spirit” and what Kumar calls a “wide-ranging
discovery of England” (218). Sport plays a crucial part in this production or refurbishment
of an English national character, and my wider argument is that Conan Doyle is among the
most important participants in this ideological discourse.
This new and belated cultural nationalism, with its palaver of national identity and
character, manifested itself in high culture – in historiography, in literary studies and teaching,
in the founding of institutions like the National Trust (1895), the National Portrait Gallery
(1896), and the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) – and also in popular culture,
from an appreciation of the countryside and pageantry to music hall songs to sport itself.
Out of this self-consciousness emerged a generally satisfying sense of the English national
spirit, with its individuality, sincerity, moderation, liberalism, love of freedom and justice,
and incapacity for abstraction and system.2 Conan Doyle played a very important role in this
discourse of the nation, in theoretical and mythographic ways in his journalistic, historical
and fictional writing, but also as a cultural sign in his own right. At the height of his celebrity,
before his spiritualistic campaigns forfeited much of his credibility, Conan Doyle was a
national writer like no other since the death of Dickens, and in this respect he stands as the
most important English writer of his time. He merits the title of national writer by virtue
of his extraordinary popularity, enabled by his talent and the material conditions of late-
Victorian periodical and book publishing and by the existence of a reading public wider and
better educated than ever before or since. But further, even in the absence of other credible
candidates, his personal celebrity was constituted by qualities that seemed to coincide with
the nation’s image of itself, rather as an ego-ideal.
 “The Straight Left” 189

It was, to be sure, a gendered ideal. “His version of authorship was socially engaged
and combative, his task as much the social performance of masculinity as the production of
texts,” Diana Barsham argues (11); Conan Doyle’s reputation “has been fixed in time as a
museum piece of British manhood” (12). His contemporaries, who read his magazine stories
and books, articles about and interviews with him, and his torrent of letters to the press,
knew him as adventurous and responsible, manly and honourable: he was everything the
English meant when they used the phrase “a good sport.”3 While my chief focus here is on
the way sport in Conan Doyle is important to both the formation and the expression of the
nation, clearly Victorian ideas of sport and nation are themselves thoroughly imbricated with
Victorian ideas of masculinity, and the history of the sportsman in the nineteenth century is
an episode in the history of the man.
That history has been the object of a good deal of curiosity in recent scholarship.
Feminism took the lead in giving attention to hegemonic modes of masculinity in the
nineteenth century, ideas and images of the male which were seen as sustaining the patriarchal
power relations that emerged from the cultural predominance of normative masculinities.
The danger then becomes a “monolithic view of men as uncomplicated agents of oppression”
(Dowling 117), a view which gender studies has set out to correct. This gave rise to an interest
in alternative and counter-cultural forms of masculinity, in the demonized male others against
whom the hegemonic male was defined, and – inevitably – to a recognition that patriarchal
masculinity itself was never as secure as it sometimes seemed. There is now something of
a consensus that Victorian manhood was neither monolithic nor stable, but on the contrary
was riven with internal contradiction and fraught with anxieties.
It is clear that a cult of manliness was practiced in the Victorian patriarchy and sustained
by stories of masculine heroism and adventure in the domains of war, empire, and exploration,
whether historical, contemporary, or fictional. Conan Doyle himself became one of the
leading contributors to this myth of manliness, in fiction and non-fiction, and also in his
own robust and active person. There was a connection between this cult of manliness
and the culture of Evangelical and Broad Church forms of Protestantism, above all in
muscular Christianity; J. R. Watson, for example, has studied the blending of the ideals
of soldier and saint in English hymns, and noticed a transition “from a defensive mode to
an offensive one in fighting hymns [which] coincides with a recognition of manly heroism
in nineteenth-century Britain” (18). Such manliness was given a national stamp by the
example of soldier-saints like Henry Havelock, hero of the so-called Indian Mutiny, or
General Gordon (whose portrait, we are told, hung on the wall of 221B Baker Street). But
its particularly Protestant modality must have resonated in rather different ways for someone
like Conan Doyle, brought up in the Roman Catholic faith which was popularly stereotyped
in Victorian times, Carol Marie Engelhardt writes, “as an irrational, emotional and highly
decorative religion, which particularly appealed to women and unmanly men” (47). While
Conan Doyle drifted away from the Catholic Church, his later religious affiliations remained
heterodox.
Herbert Sussman, in his influential study of what he calls “inscriptions of varied male
practices of the self” (11), argues that for the Victorians “manhood is not an essence but a
plot, a condition whose achievement and whose maintenance forms a narrative over time”
(13). Configurations of masculinity (and femininity) are seen in this social constructionist
paradigm as unstable, complex, and shifting. To see the matter in these terms is to get away
from an essentialist discourse of gender, and this is certainly a liberating move so long as it
190 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

does not cause us to forget that it was precisely on such an essence that the Victorians erected
their male sense of identity. Sussman, and others following him (including Barsham in her
work on Conan Doyle), see masculinity itself as an inner force, a strong libidinal current that
constantly threatened to sweep men towards madness and disorder. Manliness, then, was the
difficult and ongoing process by which Victorian masculinity was managed, controlled, and
channeled into acceptable and useful forms of activity.
In his study of early Victorian masculine poetics Sussman sees this narrative organized
into a recurring plot, in which the manly hero rejects both the perilous love of women and
male-to-male intimacy – unless the latter is thoroughly desexualized; the monkish celibate
male in a community of men “becomes the central figure through which the contradictions
and anxieties about manhood are registered” (16). We might find a social form of this literary
trope in the growing importance of sports in the all-male British public schools, where a
healthily exhausting day on the football field was a prophylactic against impurity as well as
an education in male teamwork.
The line of monkish comradely manliness Sussman traces in Carlyle and Browning
and the early days of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood could be extended easily enough to
Sherlock Holmes, famously immune to Cupid’s darts. But James Eli Adams, in Dandies and
Desert Saints, traces a paradox in the way that a display or performance of ascetic manhood
(notably in Carlyle’s self-dramatization as a prophet) itself produces a kind of dandyism.
In this too, Sherlock Holmes, that incorrigible show-off and self-admirer, is a later case in
point. The monastic figure might be broadened to include the soldier-saint who must leave
his mother to join a company of men. Various manly exploits in Conan Doyle’s adventure
fiction partake of this paradigm of ascetic manhood – though Conan Doyle’s expeditionary
heroes are often explicitly fighting for the reward of a woman’s love. The chivalrous eponym
of Sir Nigel and Edward Malone in The Lost World, who joins the all-male Challenger
expedition in obedience to his fiancée’s injunction to go away and do something heroic, are
examples. Sporting activity itself almost always appears in Conan Doyle as a ritual of male
companionship: it gets men out of the house and is something they do together.4 It may be a
healthy outlet for the boisterous drives of masculinity, but as I will show, it is also importantly
a test and a guarantor of successful manhood.
In Conan Doyle we see not only the man of letters as sportsman, but the sportsman as
man of letters. The age which made a hero of the unworldly creative artist and validated the
woman writer was one in which social concerns about gender were implicated in the figure of
the author. In English Romanticism the artist was somewhat feminized, an exceptional genius
of sensitivity removed from the sphere of action. The Victorian age saw the birth of the artist
as professional.5 The novel, it was true, might have an agenda tuned to social realities and
the world of action, yet the readership of Victorian fiction was mostly female. Another site
for anxieties about manliness to express themselves thus emerges. Andrew Dowling shows
how Forster’s biographical portrait of his friend Dickens foregrounds Dickens’s virility, a
masculine “mingling of chaos and control” (31), and how fellow novelist Trollope nonetheless
felt this portrait was compromised by revealing too much about its subject. Male writers
were commonly assessed not only in terms of writing but in terms of manliness. In a later
generation Conan Doyle, with his overwhelmingly masculine themes and his robust, plain
style, certainly validates the manliness of the man of letters, whether or not we accept
Diana Barsham’s formulation, quoted above, that his task in writing “was as much the social
performance of masculinity as the production of texts” (11).
 “The Straight Left” 191

With stories designed to give pleasure, in the words of the epigraph to The Lost World,
“To the boy who’s half a man, / And the man who’s half a boy,” Conan Doyle seemed to stand
as clearly for upright (straight) manhood and the manliness of the profession of letters as his
contemporary Oscar Wilde embodied deviance from these ideals. If this contrast seemingly
casts Doyle as a rather boring pillar of normative Victorian masculinity, it can perhaps be
complicated by his warm admiration for Wilde (and his later championship of the even more
scandalous and demonised homosexual Roger Casement) – not to mention Conan Doyle’s
public declarations of faith in the existence of fairies later in life. It is hard to imagine a
more unmanly pronouncement, or one more damaging to Conan Doyle’s status as a man of
letters. That status was one that came with responsibility, visible in a letter to his mother in
which Conan Doyle explained his decision to volunteer for military service at the time of
the South African war. “What I feel is that I have perhaps the strongest influence over young
men, especially young athletic sporting men, of anyone in England (bar Kipling)” (A Life
in Letters 434).6 It is a statement in which masculinity, writing, sport, and the nation come
together. It is now time to return to the question of just what the nation was.
What nation, after all, did Conan Doyle belong to? We can describe him as an Irish
Scots Englishman: of Irish ancestry, he was born in Scotland, and spent his professional life
in southern England. To further complicate matters, he was a lapsed Catholic educated by
Jesuits, twice stood for Parliament in Scottish constituencies as a Liberal Unionist, and used
to refer to himself proudly as “Anglo-Celt” (Edwards 180). The tangle of Conan Doyle’s own
identity is a topic for another occasion, but in its way it too is representative of a widespread
muddle about identity in Britain whose repercussions are still felt today. A Londoner asked
to name his or her nation might hesitate between several options; and then as now it would
not come very naturally for such a person to describe themselves as a Briton (or a Britisher).
The Welsh and the Scots were and are used to being thought of as English; and so on.
These telling confusions – or fusions – play out in interesting ways in Conan Doyle’s writing
about himself and the nation. He seems to have seen his own mixed ethnicity as the warrant
for building a reconciling and inclusive sense of national identity, something like a British
ethnicity.
Though his own nation turns out to be both a problematic and an idiosyncratic one,
if we look at Conan Doyle’s career as a whole it is possible to see that he quite self-
consciously set himself the task of a nation-writing programme as self-conscious and populist
as Shakespeare’s history plays – though a more direct genealogy can be traced through Walter
Scott – and that this project was partly a didactic one. Conan Doyle saw it as part of his
writerly function not just to interpret his nation but also to change it, or rather, to give it
a clearer sense of itself, both in its history and its potentiality. Sport is only one of the
parameters, or discourses, in which this project expresses itself, but it is a neglected one,
and it can give us important insight into the project’s ambitions and problems. A number
of sports had particular national significance for Conan Doyle, but none more than what he
called “the noble old English sport of boxing” (M&A 272).
Boxing is the sport Conan Doyle wrote about most. However, it was essential to his idea
of sportsmanship that he himself was not a specialist; rather, he participated in a bewildering
number of sports. The few sports he claimed to be uninterested in tell us something important
about him. He was not excited by horseracing, being of the opinion that sport is what a human
being does, not what a horse does; besides, he wrote, given “the demoralization from betting,
the rascality among some book-makers, and the collection of undesirable characters brought
192 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

together by a race meeting, I cannot avoid the conclusion that the harm greatly outweighs
the good from a broadly national point of view” (M&A 270). Target shooting fostered a vital
national skill (Conan Doyle campaigned for the formation of shooting clubs after the British
were thoroughly outclassed in marksmanship by Boer fighters during the South African
war): shooting for the pot was justified but not a sport; he considered game shooting, with
innocent birds or animals as the quarry, cruel. His explanation of this distinction hints at
what he believed sport meant or should mean. “But there is another side of the question as
to the effect of the sport upon ourselves – whether it does not blunt our own better feelings,
harden our sympathies, brutalize our natures. A coward can do it as well as a brave man;
a weakling can do it as well as a strong man. There is no ultimate good from it” (M&A
271). Here sport emerges as frankly ideological, its value measured in terms of its effect on
health, moral even more than bodily. “Good” is the vital word. How much “good” was to
be derived from it, as measured in somatic, psychic, constitutional, and spiritual health?7
A sport should be good, and it should be true. A technology-dependent sport like shooting
could not be relied on to tell the truth about the sportsman, to reveal the coward as cowardly
or the weakling as weak. As with so many of the things of which he disapproved, Conan
Doyle expressed the touching hope that game shooting would wither away with the progress
of human civilization, and “in a more advanced age it will no longer be possible” (M&A 271).
This disapproval did not extend to the sport of angling, whose victim was “a cold-blooded
creature of low organization” (M&A 272).
Having cleared the field of those sports he was not keen on, Conan Doyle still had
plenty left to enjoy. One or two, such as field athletics and baseball, he savoured only as
a spectator, but he participated in an impressive list of sports. Apart from boxing, these
include Rugby football and Association football (soccer), cricket, golf, hunting, skiing,
fencing, shooting (marksmanship), fishing, archery, cycling, ballooning, climbing, motoring
and motorbicycling, bowling, and billiards. He also claimed to have taken sporting pleasure
in risky activities such as war and whaling. He took a course of muscular development with
his friend Eugene Sandow, the strong man who was said to be able to lift an elephant. Among
what might be called the negative highlights of his sporting career, he failed to teach golf to
Rudyard Kipling on a visit to Vermont in 1894; he was widely – but wrongly – believed to be
one of those spectators who helped the exhausted Italian marathon runner Dorando across the
finishing line in the 1908 London Olympics, an event which led to Dorando’s disqualification;
he declined an invitation to referee the world heavyweight boxing championship bout between
Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson in 1910;8 and he was chosen, after a campaign in the press,
to coordinate British preparations for the scheduled 1916 Olympic Games in Berlin, which
never took place.
“I have never specialized,” Conan Doyle wrote, “and have therefore been a second-rater
in all things. I have made up for it by being an all-rounder, and have had, I dare say, as much
fun out of sport as many an adept” (M&A 269). He continued playing football until the age
of forty-four, and cricket for ten years more; on the whole cricket had, he said, given him
more pleasure than any other branch of sport (M&A 281). Rugby was the finest team sport,
in his opinion, while billiards was the best indoor game. Golf was “the coquette of games”
(M&A 278), never quite to be mastered. But while these and other sports occupied his time
and gave him pleasure, boxing above all captured his imagination. Featured more than any
other sport in Conan Doyle’s writing, boxing was invested with profound personal, national,
even metaphysical significance. Remembering a dangerous bout of fever he suffered as a
 “The Straight Left” 193

young man on the coast of West Africa, it seems to have come naturally to Conan Doyle to
cast the experience in a boxing idiom: “I lay for several days fighting it out with Death in a
very small ring and without a second” (M&A 52).
Sport is both a cultural and a competitive activity. It brings people together in order to
set them in opposition. In a moment I will look at some of Conan Doyle’s purely fictional
stories about boxing, but first I will use the occurrence of man-to-man fist-fighting in his
autobiographical writing to argue that Conan Doyle’s account of his own experience in
different narratives associates bouts of pugilism with what might be called liminal or threshold
moments in his career. In choosing three such moments and indicating their striking structural
similarities, I do not mean to allege that Conan Doyle was an unreliable historian of his own
life – to do so would rank high, or low, among futile critical activities – but to claim that
these stories, whatever their basis in experience, show that boxing was implicated in his
conception of himself and the trajectory of his manhood. If, as we have seen, shooting could
not be relied upon to tell the truth about a man, boxing was prized because that is precisely
what it did.
In 1880, while still a medical student, Conan Doyle spent seven months at sea as ship’s
surgeon in the whaling vessel Hope. Seeing that the young doctor had brought two pairs of
boxing gloves in his luggage, the steward Jack Lamb proposed a bout there and then. The
steward was the smaller man and knew nothing of sparring; Conan Doyle describes how he
“kept propping him off as he rushed at me,” and eventually “had to hit him out with some
severity” (“Life on a Greenland Whaler” 482). Comically, his prowess as a boxer earned
him the steward’s respect as a doctor – “the best surr-geon we’ve had!” – and seems to have
guaranteed good relations between the medical student and the working class crew.
The second incident is in The Stark Munro Letters (Stark Munro), an autobiographical
novel of 1895 which Conan Doyle acknowledged to follow pretty accurately (with the
exception of the Lord Saltire episode) his own experiences when setting out in life as a
young adult. Here we see Stark Munro paying a visit to Cullingworth, a friend from student
days, with whom he will soon go into partnership in a medical practice.9 At Cullingworth’s
suggestion, they spar in the drawing room in the evening. “I led off, and then in he came
hitting with both hands, and grunting like a pig at every blow. From what I could see of him
he was no boxer at all, but just a formidable rough and tumble fighter” (32). Stark Munro,
a trained amateur boxer, gets the better of Cullingworth, who loses his temper and demands
that they fight without gloves, Mrs Cullingworth fortunately intervening in time to prevent
this. Again, though this time against an antagonist of his own class, the protagonist proves
his skill and character, particularly by containing the wildness of his opponent. But the bout
also reveals the volatility and vindictiveness of Cullingworth, which eventually brings the
partnership to an acrimonious end. (Cullingworth also proves to be not above unethical or
unprofessional behaviour in his medical practice.)
Stark Munro sets up on his own in a new town, and on his first evening he undergoes
another ordeal. Seeing a drunken man beating his wife in the street, he intervenes and
discovers once again that his opponent is dangerous but unskilled: “The fellow was a round
hand hitter, but so strong that he needed watching. A round blow is, as you know, more
dangerous than a straight one if it gets home; for the angle of the jaw, the ear, and the
temple, are the three weakest points which you present” (Stark Munro 174). Again, Stark
Munro acquits himself well against this unorthodox opponent, and this augurs well for his
professional and personal fortunes in the new place, where he will set up a successful practice
194 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

and eventually marry. In his non-fictional account of the incident, Conan Doyle reports that
his antagonist that night unwittingly became one of his first patients (M&A 63).
There is no particular reason to doubt that these incidents actually took place, but
this does not disqualify the assertion that they are instances of a trope in Conan Doyle’s
life narrative which we may call a proof – in the double sense of test and demonstration,
experiment and conclusion – and an idea of some importance to the author of the Sherlock
Holmes stories. Like the biblical Jacob wrestling with his angel on the bank of a river, the
Doyle protagonist finds himself on the threshold of a new and challenging experience and
undergoes a test of character and manhood which will tell if he is fit for it. The association
of sport, and above all boxing, with goodness and truth makes it a symbolically appropriate
vehicle for the physical and moral ordeal which anticipates and in some sense guarantees an
adventure on a much grander scale. This is a tropic pattern reproduced as a national drama
in Conan Doyle’s 1896 novel of pugilism, Rodney Stone.
Rodney Stone narrates the story, looking back from 1851 to the time of his youth before
the battle of Trafalgar; in other words, this is a novel written at the end of the nineteenth
century, about events at the beginning of the century, supposedly recollected in the middle
of the century. At the dramatic centre of the novel is the sport of prizefighting, with its
bare-knuckle champions and the aristocratic “fancy,” the Regency bucks who sponsor and
bet on them.10 Conan Doyle embeds this theme in a fairly preposterous melodrama involving
a supposedly haunted house, a man falsely accused of murder, a blacksmith’s nephew who is
revealed to be the son of a lord, and an aristocratic rotter. All this takes place against the wider
backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, and ends with Rodney Stone and his father preparing to
join the fleet that would eventually triumph at Trafalgar. As with all his historical novels,
Rodney Stone is carefully researched. Conan Doyle took pains to make the historical detail,
and especially the prizefighting, as accurate as he could. Several actual Regency fighters make
an appearance, as well as figures like the Prince himself, Beau Brummel, and Lord Nelson.
Boxing was peculiarly British, as the anonymous Fistiana; or, The Oracle of the Ring
patriotically claimed. “Among the sports and games for which this country is distinguished,
perhaps there is not one so purely national, or so decidedly indigenous to our soil as that
of boxing; and whether viewed as a sport, or as a means of settling those differences which
are constantly arising among men, however peaceably disposed, it is equally deserving
encouragement” (19). Rodney Stone himself carefully sets Regency prizefighting in the
context of a national history and character.

Public opinion was then largely in its favour, and there were good reasons why it should be so. It was
a time of war, when England with an army and navy composed only of those who volunteered to fight
because they had fighting blood in them, had to encounter, as they would now have to encounter, a
power which could by despotic law turn every citizen into a soldier. If the people had not been full
of this lust for combat, it is certain that England must have been overborne. And it was thought, and
is, on the face of it, reasonable, that a struggle between two indomitable men, with thirty thousand to
view it and three million to discuss it, did help to set a standard of hardihood and endurance. Brutal
it was, no doubt, and its brutality is the end of it; but it is not so brutal as war, which will survive it.
(12)

This is what boxing meant to the nation. England (actually Britain, whatever Nelson
expected), being a free country, had no official conscription and relied on volunteers to
 “The Straight Left” 195

defend it. The country’s fighting spirit was demonstrated and fostered by the spectacle of
bare-knuckle fighting. Conan Doyle in his Memories and Adventures expressed very similar
sentiments: “I have never concealed my opinion that the old prize-ring was an excellent thing
from a national point of view – exactly as glove-fighting is now. Better that our sports should
be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy” (274).
This opinion explains the relation between the prizefighting foreground and the
geopolitical background of Rodney Stone: in a narrative trope of the kind we have encountered
before, the crisis of 1805 is a liminal moment in England’s fortunes, and the boxing ring is
the proof of Trafalgar, a kind of ritual prefiguring the victory to come. The national ethos,
exemplified and fostered in competitive fair play, is the base upon which the superstructure
of national success is erected: this is the theory. (A theory which also holds in Conan
Doyle’s 1891 medieval adventure, The White Company, where English military triumphs
are prefigured by success in the jousting lists.) In Rodney Stone the sport, and its narrative
climax in the meticulously described match between Crab Wilson and Champion Harrison,
is the arena for the testing and display of the qualities of indigenous heroism that will
defeat Napoleon and underwrite future imperial triumphs. These qualities include natural
ability, endurance, the skills which contemporary handbooks insisted constituted a “science”
of boxing, and what Conan Doyle called “the traditions of British fair play” (M&A 274).
Importantly, both Wilson and Harrison, loser and winner, exemplify these values, which are
shared by the other working-class professional fighters in the story.11 And just as importantly,
they are also embodied in the Corinthians, that class of sporting dandies exemplified by
Rodney’s uncle, Sir Charles Tregellis. Sir Charles is at first sight ludicrously foppish and
affected, like Sir Nigel Loring in Conan Doyle’s medieval adventure stories (the diminutive
Sir Nigel and the effete Sir Charles should both caution us against an oversimplification
of Conan Doyle’s idea of masculine heroism). Sir Charles turns out to be both fearless
and honourable, and the institution of prize-fighting is shown to be a collaborative venture,
bringing together the working-class professionals who did the fighting and the aristocratic
patrons who sponsored them. Boxing is in an absolute sense an individual sport. This is
why for Conan Doyle it was so true. But boxing was also a shared experience, a ritual, an
institution, and a culture in which fighters represented others and were interdependent with
their supporters.12
In fact this pugilistic utopia is yet more inclusive. There is a scene at the heart of the novel
in which Sir Charles gives a supper to the fancy at the Waggon and Horses, a well-known
sporting public house, inviting both the chief fighting-men of the day and the gentlemen
of fashion most interested in the ring. This is where the wager is made that leads to the
great match between Harrison and Wilson. The supper takes place in a large room, with
Union Jacks and mottoes hung thickly upon the walls; the guests range from Prince George
himself (incognito as the Earl of Chester) to Joe Berks, a drunken Whitechapel bruiser. The
narrative emphasizes the inclusiveness of this scene, naming several famous pugilists present
who were Irish, Jewish, or black American.13 Others come from the midlands, the north of
England, or the west (the two greatest Regency champions, Jem Belcher and Tom Cribb,
were from Bristol). Cribb became a celebrity of sorts, and he was the subject of numerous
popular prints (Figure 3). But above all it is a scene of national manhood, a social epitome
exclusively masculine and specifically genealogized, the manners and powerful physique
of the boxers reminding the narrator of their Norse or German ancestors, while here and
there “the pale aquiline features of a sporting Corinthian recalled rather the Norman type”
196 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Figure 3. Portrait of Tom Cribb, known as the “Black Diamond of Bristol.” Bristol History. Web. Courtesy
of Paul Thomson.
 “The Straight Left” 197

(Rodney Stone 163). Boxing brings together classes and ethnicities and demonstrates their
commonalities; the Waggon and Horses thus offers a fantasy of the nation as union, indeed
a version of pastoral with the boxer as swain (or arguably with the Corinthian as swain and
the boxer as sheep).14
The scene, so like one of those broad didactic social canvases of which the Victorians
were fond, epitomizes the national fighting spirit.15 Sir Charles, the host, makes a speech in
which he claims that in the crisis of war “we should be forced to fall back upon native valour
trained into hardihood by the practice and contemplation of manly sports” (Rodney Stone
174). My argument has been that the story of Rodney Stone proves this claim, the exhibition
of English manhood in competitive sport guaranteeing success to come in the struggle against
Napoleon promised on the last page. The battle of Waterloo may or may not have been won
on the playing fields of Eton, but the battle of Trafalgar, the novel argues, was won in the prize
ring. Conan Doyle himself, writing in the nineteen-twenties, felt that the revival of boxing in
England, for which he took some credit, was vindicated in “the supreme test of all time,” the
Great War, when “the combative spirit and aggressive quickness gave us the attacking fire
and helped especially in bayonet work” (M&A 275).16 France, now an ally, also benefited.
“It was a great day for France when English sports, boxing, Rugby football and others came
across to them, and when a young man’s ideal ceased to be amatory adventure with an
occasional duel. England has taught Europe much, but nothing of more value than this”
(M&A 275). Further, Conan Doyle was an enthusiast for international competitive sport, but
he understood it as a competition between sportsmen representing their nations; memories
of the rancour of the America’s Cup yacht races in 1893 and the rivalries of the Olympic
Games of 1908 left him “by no means assured that sport has that international effect for good
which some people have claimed for it” (M&A 231). He guessed that in ancient Greece the
awards at Olympia may have started more wars than they stopped.
The fight between Jim Harrison and Crab Wilson is the narrative climax of Rodney Stone.
It takes place on Crawley Downs in the rain before a crowd of thirty thousand, for as Rodney
explains, “the love of the ring was confined to no class, but was a national peculiarity, deeply
seated in the English nature.”

The ale-drinking, the rude good-fellowship, the heartiness, the laughter at discomforts, the craving to
see the fight – all these may be set down as vulgar and trivial by those to whom they are distasteful;
but to me, listening to the far-off and uncertain echoes of our distant past, they seem to have been the
very bones upon which much that is most solid and virile in this ancient race was moulded. (251)

But this paradisiacal vision of essential Englishness contains a snake, and it is here that the
relentless simplicities of Rodney Stone must admit a problem. The sporting crowd may be
another image of utopian England, but it gets out of hand, and so does the fight itself. The very
success and popularity of the prize ring guarantees its corruption by betting, match-fixing,
and cheating. At the same time, Conan Doyle’s melodrama requires a dastardly villain bent
on ensuring that the best man loses. The excitement of the plot thus depends on the agency
of the wicked – a bad sport. Villainous Sir Lothian Hume tries to nobble Sir Charles’s fighter
so as to win the huge wager by default. When the fight goes ahead and it becomes clear
Crab Wilson is going to lose, Sir Lothian’s armed thugs, a “vile crew of ring-side parasites
and ruffians” (313), break the ring (in an organized pitch invasion), steal the time-keepers’
watches, and threaten Harrison. A draw has to be declared.
198 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

So even this supreme demonstration of English goodness, truth, and commonality is

borne down by villainy, money, and the mob – the same corrupting elements, as we have
seen, which convinced Conan Doyle that in horseracing too “the harm greatly outweighs
the good from a broadly national point of view” (M&A 270). Rodney Stone from his mid-
century vantage had already entered the corruption that overtook prize-fighting into the
narrative record: “[f]or this reason the Ring is dying in England” (12). Conan Doyle makes
the same point about this most English of sports in Memories and Adventures: “It was
ruined by the villainous mobs who cared nothing for the chivalry of sport or the traditions
of British fair play as compared with the money gain which the contest might bring. Their
blackguardism drove out the good men – the men who really did uphold the ancient standards,
and so the whole institution passed into rottenness and decay” (274). If sport tells the truth
about England, then spoilsports, with their greed, cheating, and thuggery, are part of that
truth. Here is the poignancy of nostalgia: to narrate what you feel nostalgia for is to tell the
tale of how it disappeared. To adapt Proust, the only true story about paradise is paradise
lost.
How could the sport, and the nation, counter the defilement that money and competitive
greed seemed inevitably to spread like pitch on its sturdy traditions? The redeeming agent
was, of course, the cult of the amateur, the embodiment of fair play and sport for its own sake
(see Holt 74–134). The still-current sporting meaning of this word, which designates someone
who does sport as a pastime and not for money, is a Victorian invention. The breeding ground
for the ideology of the amateur was the great public schools, with their emphasis on sport
as cultivator of the moral qualities that distinguished a gentleman, particularly in public and
imperial service. There is an extensive literature on this subject.17 We may be inclined to
think of the professional sportsman as a phenomenon of modernity, but this is only true
inasmuch as the professional is constituted by difference from the amateur, and it is the
amateur that is the formation of an emergent cluster of nineteenth-century ethics, including
muscular Christianity, team spirit, and “the white man’s burden.”18 Now, Rodney Stone had
celebrated pugilism, but in doing so had also shown the inevitable corruption and discrediting
of the fight game in England. A few years later, as if to purge the skullduggery of the earlier
tale and restore boxing’s proper meaning as a ritual of the true national ethos, Conan Doyle
wrote another prize-fighting story, “The Croxley Master.”
How to reconcile the representative or popular notion of the sporting champion with the
more disinterested and high-minded values of the gentlemanly amateur? In “The Croxley
Master” this problem is solved through the almost metaphysical trope of the amateur
professional. The young hero of the story is Montgomery, a sporting but poor medical
student who accepts an invitation to box against an old professional, Silas Craggs, champion
of the iron-workers at the Croxley smelting works, in Yorkshire.19 This is not a bare-knuckle
contest but a modern boxing match fought with gloves over twenty rounds according to
Queensberry rules, with a celebrity referee brought up from London. In this bout Montgomery
represents the workers of the Wilson coal-pits. For the student, winning the money prize will
enable him to complete his medical studies at university and qualify as a doctor. Though
fighting the Master for money means he will forever forfeit his amateur status, Montgomery
sees no problem; he is quite content to show his mettle in this bout and never box again.
Though he is an outsider, his manifest pluck makes him a local hero for the Yorkshire
miners and, in a familiar way, a strangely idyllic image of the nation crystallizes around the
fight.
 “The Straight Left” 199

Sometimes brutal, sometimes grotesque, the love of sport is still one of the great agencies which
make for the happiness of our people. It lies very deeply in the springs of our nature, and when it has
been educated out, a higher, more refined nature may be left, but it will not be of that robust British
type which has left its mark so deeply on the world. Every one of these ruddled workers, slouching
with his dog at his heels to see something of the fight, was a true unit of his race. (“The Croxley
Master” 47–48)

As with Rodney Stone, the fight is at the centre of the tale, narrated at length and with much
technical detail. Montgomery wins a fierce and fair bout that reflects credit on both him
and his working-class opponent. He claims the prize, but resists his backers’ urging to make
a career as a sportsman. He has turned professional for a day only to gain entry into his
true profession, medicine. As with the young Conan Doyle on the whaler, Montgomery’s
prowess with the boxing gloves seems to guarantee his qualities as a physician, and he is
invited to come back to practice medicine in the locality, being assured that “we’ve plenty
of doctors, but you’re the only man in the Riding that could smack the Croxley Master off
his legs” (185). Montgomery is neither an aristocrat of the sporting class nor a horny-handed
son of toil. Sport for Conan Doyle was an image of the nation, and one signal difference
between the Regency fight and the Victorian one is the entry of the new national hegemon,
the professional-administrative middle class.
An amateur was not just someone for whom sport was not a trade. He was, crucially, not
bound to a single specialism. This can be seen most interestingly in the contrasting physique
of the opponents in this story. The Master, a professional fighter, has huge shoulders and
great arms out of proportion to his lower body: his is a chthonic masculinity. His single trade
has made him ungainly and ugly, with a hint of a Mr. Hyde-like recession to the simian.
“Montgomery, on the other hand, was as symmetrical as a Greek statue. It would be an
encounter between a man who was specially fitted for one sport, and one who was equally
capable of any” (157). Both of them are real men. But amateurism has made Montgomery,
the all-rounder, a well-rounded man, and has given him the special gift of versatility which
his class brought to administration and leadership at home and abroad. Government, and
Government House, was not a place for narrow specialists: in this sense, Britain and the British
Empire really were run by amateurs. A gentleman could exercise leadership quite literally
anywhere. Colonial governors might be posted from one continent to another and expected
to get on with the job, while ministers (like Churchill), subject to cabinet reshufflings, were
counted on to be equally capable of running the Colonial Office, the Navy, or the Exchequer.
Further, the ethos of British leadership emphasized that a man in authority, like any amateur,
should not appear to be trying too hard. Conan Doyle was delighted to learn that Lord
Cromer, de facto ruler of Egypt for a quarter of a century, was in the habit of bringing critical
diplomatic interviews to an abrupt conclusion “with the explanation that the time had come
for his daily lawn-tennis engagement” (M&A 128).
With his prodigious battery of sporting skills, it would be hard to find a better embodiment
of the amateur ethos than Conan Doyle himself. He was an accomplished cricketer, playing
on occasion for the MCC (the famous Marylebone Cricket Club), his best performance at
Lords being seven wickets for fifty-one against Cambridgeshire in 1904; on one memorable
occasion he bowled the legendary W. G. Grace. But he was just as happy to turn out for
the ramshackle team put together by his friend J. M. Barrie, named the Allah-Akbarries in
token of their inability to win without divine intervention. This was what might be called
200 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

jocular amateurism. At the further end of the amateur scale were the great champions
such as Grace himself, cricketing “gentlemen” who competed alongside waged professional
“players” belonging to a lower social order. In cricket these two kinds of sportsman sustained
a double narrative about sport and the nation, with one evoking the sturdy native qualities
of the English that Conan Doyle had attributed to the prize-fighters of old, and the other
exemplifying the unselfish accomplishments of superior men born and trained to lead and
serve country and empire.20
It looked like a serviceable allegory of the nation, but it never really worked. The more
skilful and dedicated (and successful) the amateur, the more amateurism became burdened
with contradictions. W. G. Grace himself was an example.21 Though as an amateur he was
not paid to play cricket, he was not above putting his celebrity to profitable use, for example
endorsing Hudson’s Extract of Soap, recommended for its ability to clean cricket whites
(Figure 4). Nor was he always a good example of the amateur creed that it is more important
to take part in a game than to win. As Derek Birley says, “many instances of his excessive
keenness to win and the reluctance of umpires to give him out were recorded” (332). Grace
charged large fees for organizing exhibition matches and for raising teams to tour overseas.
In 1879 there were several testimonial matches for the great amateur and “[a]t a ceremony
at Lords he was presented, after glowing tributes from the aristocracy, with a cheque for
£1,400, as an aid to purchasing a medical practice” (333).22 Less than a year earlier the
Gloucestershire County Cricket Club had called a special meeting to investigate various
charges of irregularity involving the Grace family (W. G.’s brother, E. M. Grace, was club
secretary and kept the accounts). It could be very tricky keeping amateurism unsullied by
money, as Conan Doyle himself discovered through his involvement with the committee
assembled to ensure that Britain put up a better show in the 1916 Olympics than they had
done in 1912, where British athletes’ performance was considered a national humiliation.
Conan Doyle’s committee launched an appeal for a fund of one hundred thousand pounds
for athletic training and facilities – and was promptly accused on all sides of “developing
professionalism” (M&A 235–37).
Amateurism then proved in practice not quite the simplification of sport that it had
seemed. But there was another crucial dimension to sport – and a justification for it. It
was acknowledged in the amateur creed that sport, as Richard Holt puts it, “had not only
to be played in good spirit, it had to be played with style” (Holt 99).23 Sport might be
healthy, educative, morally uplifting, and socially adhesive, but it was also beautiful – a
quality repeatedly demonstrated in Conan Doyle’s mildly homoerotic descriptions of boxers’
bodies. The gifted sportsman was an example of style, just as much as the gifted musician
or orator. There was a beauty in what he did. Among Conan Doyle’s sportsmen, the great
exemplar of style is Lord John Roxton, who joins the expedition to the Amazon in The
Lost World, and is described as “one of the great all-round sportsmen and athletes of his
day” (52). An intrepid soldier, hunter, and crack shot, Lord John moves through the story
with an apparently effortless grace which is as much aesthetic as athletic and moral – for
example, when the others scramble and crawl across a sixty-foot tree trunk bridging a jungle
precipice, Lord John simply walks across. In his bachelor apartment in the Albany, with
its atmosphere of “masculine virility,” sketches of boxers, ballet girls, and racehorses adorn
the walls, alongside paintings by Fragonard, Girardet, and Turner (52). The coolness and
integrity of the true sportsman expresses itself in ethical terms too, for only three years earlier
Lord John carried out a single-handed freelance war against Peruvian slave-drivers on the
 “The Straight Left” 201

Figure 4. (Color online) Advertisement for Hudson’s Extract of Soap, featuring the celebrity sportsman W.
G. Grace. Courtesy of the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey.

Putamayo River. This is not an international war, but an amateur one. “‘Declared it myself,
waged it myself, ended it myself,’” Lord John tells the narrator Malone (56). This is the
disinterestedness of the amateur, the determination of the competitor, and the panache of the
stylist. For the true sportsman style is ethical and goodness is beautiful. The straight bat, and
the straight left, could not be wielded by a crooked heart.24
Those liminal encounters discussed above, in the whaling memoir and in The Stark Munro
Letters, which pitched the trained sparring man against an undisciplined fighter, the straight
left against the round hand hitter, were ethical as well as physical tests. Style underwrote
goodness – or so Conan Doyle felt it should. His faith in this precept of straightness helps
explain why he could not entirely approve his brother-in-law E. W. Hornung’s character
A. J. Raffles, the “amateur cracksman” who played cricket for England but was secretly a
thief.25 Straightness in sport was both the mark of a stylist and a bulwark against crooks
like Sir Lothian Hume, unstable and unethical figures like Cullingworth, or ruffians like the
wife-beating drunk in The Stark Munro Letters. One final instance in a story from 1903
concerns a gentleman who claims to have “some proficiency in the good old British sport of
boxing.” Returning from a visit to the country with a black eye, he tells his friend about his
enquiries in a local pub after a nefarious character called Woodley, also pictured in Sidney
Paget’s illustration in The Strand Magazine (Figure 5):
202 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Figure 5. “A straight left against a slogging ruffian.” Sidney Paget, illustration for “The Adventure of the
Solitary Cyclist,” by Arthur Conan Doyle, Strand Magazine 27 (Jan. 1904), 9.
 “The Straight Left” 203

We had got as far as this when who should walk in but the gentleman himself, who had been drinking
his beer in the tap-room, and had heard the whole conversation. Who was I? What did I want? What
did I mean by asking questions? He had a fine flow of language, and his adjectives were very vigorous.
He ended a string of abuse by a vicious back-hander, which I failed to entirely avoid. The next few
minutes were delicious. It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian. I emerged as you see me. Mr
Woodley went home in a cart . . .26 (“The Solitary Cyclist” 62–63).

University of Hong Kong

NOTES

The author is grateful for support from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council in the preparation of
this essay, and for invaluable help from Katherine Isobel Baxter and Fiona Chung.
1. For a signal Irish reaction to English cultural nationalism, see Gibson 8–20. Gibson reads Ulysses as,
among much else, an Irish refusal to be embraced by an imperial British nationality.
2. See especially Collini 342–73, Kumar 175–225.
3. “Sport,” in the sense of a likeable person who participates in a generous and sportsmanlike spirit, is a
late nineteenth-century usage. The OED’s first citation in this sense is dated 1881.
4. The exception would be sports such as tennis and croquet, in which women participated. These “lawn”
sports were both ideologically and literally closer to the home with its mixed company and feminine
domestic space.
5. See the discussion of the career of Millais in Sussman 140–58, and his argument that “the social
formation of professional man resolved specific contradictions of nineteenth-century manhood by
reconciling the demand to follow a morally valued calling with the imperative of achieving the
financial success that defined bourgeois manliness” (153).
6. Letter to Mary Doyle, undated [25th or 26th December 1899].
7. “The physiological model of the healthy body was, in the nineteenth century, a common means of
conceptualizing psychological health, as well as the health of the whole person, mind and body
together” (Haley 19). Haley notes that in English, “the words health, wholeness and holiness are
related.” And the opposite of “ill,” of course, was “good.” After Conrad’s Marlow has consulted Mr.
Stein and heard him diagnose Lord Jim’s condition as romanticism, Marlow continues the medical
idiom, asking what Stein would prescribe: “What’s good for it?” he enquires (Conrad 128). The
question would have been all too familiar to Dr. Conan Doyle.
8. Jeffries was white – the “great white hope” – and Johnson was black. Conan Doyle was apparently the
only person the two managers could agree on to referee the match impartially. He was at first keen to
do it but in the end declined on the sufficiently ironic grounds that his hands were full with work for
the Congo Reform Association. See Booth 274–75.
9. “Cullingworth” is the fictional portrait of George Turnavine Budd, Doyle’s medical partner in
Plymouth; the same name is used for Budd in the autobiographical Memories and Adventures. However,
Dudley Edwards cautiously describes The Stark Munro Letters as “closer to real life than is customary
with any but first novels . . . but not necessarily as clear a guide to Conan Doyle’s life as to his mind
in 1881–84” (291).
10. It seems reasonable to call this a Regency story though the action takes place before Trafalgar (1805)
and Prince George was not actually appointed Regent until the Regency Act of 1811.
11. It is the same story in the 1909 tale “The Lord of Falconbridge: A Legend of the Ring” (The Last
Galley), where a professional boxer is hired by a mysterious lady to fight a man who turns out to be
her cheating husband; he refuses her command to beat the husband when he is down.
204 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

12. For a remarkable examination of the personal and cultural meanings of boxing, in a different time and
place, see essays in Early 1–109.
13. The admiring portrait of the black pugilist Bill Richmond is in marked contrast to the portrayal of the
bruiser Steve Dixie in the late story, “The Three Gables,” published in Strand Magazine in October
1926 (and in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1927). Holmes’s insulting mockery of the boxer
in “The Three Gables” is a rare instance of overt racism in Conan Doyle. This unpleasant and feeble
story causes much anguish in Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. For Conan Doyle and race, see Edwards
243–76.
14. For sport and national identity during the Napoleonic wars, see Birley 151–71.
15. This is a ubiquitous argument in the literature of pugilism, making its way even into the title of
the anonymous 1812 publication Pancratia, or a History of Pugilism. Containing a full account of
every battle of note from the time of Broughton and Slack, down to the present day. Interspersed with
anecdotes of all the celebrated pugilists of this country; With an argumentative Proof, that Pugilism,
considered as a Gymnic Exercise, demands the Admiration, and Patronage of every free State, being
calculated to inspire manly Courage, and a Spirit of Independence – enabling us to resist Slavery at
Home and Enemies from Abroad.
16. To judge by “The Islanders” (1902), Kipling did not think much of sport as a training ground for war.
This poem critiques his country’s unpreparedness for the South African war: “Then ye returned to
your trinkets; then ye contented your souls / With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied
oafs at the goals” (302).
17. Outstandingly in the work of J. A. Mangan (1981 and 1998). See also Holt, Haley, Brailsford, and
Birley.
18. See Birley, who adds that legislators of sport “felt obliged to spend a great deal of time trying to
reconcile old notions of gentlemanly privilege with the emergent idea of amateurism” (6).
19. There appears to be a particularly close association between sport (especially boxing) and medical
students, who were inclined to be boisterous and disreputable when released from long hours of study.
“These aspects of student life were as conspicuous as its brutalizing character was notorious. Even
when sport provided an alternative outlet for youthful energy, a focus on work remained unfashionable”
(Digby 55). University of Edinburgh medical students had a particularly effervescent reputation in a
relatively relaxed academic regime; unlike their counterparts at Oxford or Cambridge, for example,
they “had the freedom to live where and how they wished, and could choose whether or not to attend
classes or even examinations” (Rodin and Key 12). Conan Doyle however seems not to have done
much sport while a student at Edinburgh, no doubt because he needed to use his time to earn money
to support his studies.
20. For a useful profile of the latter, see the memoir by Ralph Furse, a long-serving Colonial Service
director of recruitment (219–22).
21. Conan Doyle was a lifelong admirer of the great man, and wrote an obituary tribute entitled “The
Greatest of Cricketers, Dr W. G. Grace” (Lycett 362).
22. £1,400 in 1879 is the equivalent of £97,760 in 2006, according to the calculations of Measuring
Worth.com. (1 Jan. 2008 <http://www.measuringworth.com/index.html>)
23. Holt quotes the words of the Harrow School song, “Strife without anger, art without malice” (27).
24. For a wonderful example of the ethical meaning of sporting straightness, see Sewell, The Straight
Left.
25. However the Raffles story “Gentlemen and Players” (in Hornung’s The Amateur Cracksman) reveals
that Raffles, besides being a dangerous bat, is a slow (i.e. spin) bowler, the most devious kind of
cricketer. Conan Doyle was a medium pace bowler, of course, and useful with the bat.
26. Dr. Watson records that the events in “The Solitary Cyclist” took place in 1895. The story was serialized
in Collier’s (1903) and the Strand Magazine (1904) and both had an illustration, by Frederick Dorr
Steele and Sidney Paget (reproduced here) respectively, of the incident of the “straight left against a
slogging ruffian.”
 “The Straight Left” 205

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